A Brief History of the Future: A Brave and Controversial Look at the Twenty-First Century Read Online Free PDF Page A

products for all other services. Over increasingly vast spaces, deploying technologies increasingly efficient in the practice of violence, injustice, and splendor, it fosters the market and democracy — market democracy . Despite a thousand ups and downs that continue to block the vision of many, it gives birth to the mercantile order. It raises the triumphant ideal of freedom for every man, or in any case for those best prepared to conquer it. Over the centuries it purges every institution until, not much later, it turns convulsive.
The Judeo-Greek Ideal: The New and the Beautiful
    Around 1300 BCE, the cyclical notion of the world is turned on its head by a few unbelievably inventive Mediterranean peoples — the aforementioned Greeks, Phoenicians, and Hebrews. They share a passion for progress, metaphysics, action, and for the new and beautiful.
    The better to defend themselves against their neighbors, the Greeks revolutionize their ships, weapons, pottery, and their cosmogonies. The Phoenicians, settled in Syria and along the Mediterranean coast, create the first alphabet, allowing transcription of their writings into other languages in the interest of less trouble-fraught trade with their neighbors. At exactlythe same time a few herders (who call themselves Hebrews in order to affirm their identity) leave Mesopotamia for Canaan, the land promised them by their one and universal God.
    For these three peoples, human life comes before anything else. For them, every man is equal to his neighbor (with the exception of slaves and “half-breeds”). Poverty is a curse: the world cries out to be tamed, to be improved, and to be structured until such time as a Savior arrives to change its laws. For the first time, the human future is conceived of as able — as obligated — to be better than the past. For the first time, material enrichment is perceived as a way of drawing nearer to God or the gods. Such is the ideal that takes hold. It will become the ideal of the West, then of the whole mercantile order down to this day — the Judeo-Greek ideal .
    A century later, around 1200 BCE, the Phoenicians found Tyre, Sidon, Utica, and Gades (Cádiz). The Hebrews leave Canaan for Egypt. In the Peloponnese and Attica, two other peoples from Central Asia (Dorians and Ionians) develop a handful of cities, including Sparta — a farming city employing many slaves — and Athens — a small trading port wholly turned toward the open sea. The Spartans, sedentary peasants, become a military nation out of fear of their own slaves, whereas the Athenian — traders, men of letters, sailors — develop a formidable fleet to fend off their enemies. According to legend, Knossos disappears at the assaults of the Mycenaeans.
    Philosophers, interpreters, seamen, physicians, artists, and traders (Greek, Phoenician, and Jewish, butalso Mongol, Indian, and Persian) create commercial circuits connecting all the empires of Eurasia. Crossing every border, even during wars, they transmit ideas and products from the Iberian Peninsula to China, where the Chang are now overthrown by the Zhou, the first dynasty whose existence has been historically confirmed and whose chiefs take the title of Tianzi (“Sons of Heaven”).
    Around 1200 before our era the Jewish people, back from their Egyptian sojourn, elect judges to lead themselves. But in 1000 they finds themselves under serious threat from the Philistines. With death in its heart, they agree to install a monarchy (Saul, then David, then Solomon). They too have been historically validated. In 931 BCE, they split into two kingdoms.
    Shortly thereafter, the merchants of Athens assert their rights against the owners of the agricultural hinterland. For their sole benefit, they invent the rudiments of what will become democracy and money.
    The first of these dooms dynastic empires. The second makes it possible to express the value of any object by means of a single standard. Both aim to wrest power from the